I started as a paperboy. Sometime in 1974, at the ripe old age of 12, I began delivering the Seattle Times in a suburban subdivision that could have doubled as a set on The Brady Bunch. For three years, I overcame deadlines, dogs, and sometimes dreadful weather to get folded papers onto dry porches. I officially entered the workforce.
Since that time, I have held no fewer than thirty jobs. In high school and college, I washed dishes, bagged groceries, flipped French fries, sold appliances, shelved books, delivered office supplies, counted people for a census, mentored boys at a summer camp, wrote articles, and answered phone calls for a congressman.
In one summer job, at a vegetable packing plant, I stood inside a small refrigerated chamber and broke up clumps of frozen peas on a moving conveyer belt. With a long rake. For eight hours a day.
All of the grunt jobs prepared me well for the "real" world, where I made my mark as a sportswriter, an editor, a librarian, and finally as an author. Each experience taught me patience, humility, discipline, responsibility, and many other things I applied in life.
Though most of these jobs are decades in the past, I remembered all of them today as I punched a time card for the last time and officially retired. Leaving my position as a computer lab assistant at a Las Vegas library brought fifty years of labor into focus.
When people work a wide variety of jobs, they learn a lot about themselves. When they work with a wide variety of people, they learn a lot about society. They learn things that give them perspective and a better understanding of the world around them.
I know I did. I not only learned things but also put them to use. In several novels, I borrowed from work experiences, particularly those as a grocery clerk, a newspaper reporter, and a librarian. In Camp Lake I did even more. I constructed an entire story around my memorable tenure at a summer camp in Maine in 1983. I expect to incorporate even more work experiences in future books.
In the meantime, I will look back. I will remember the unexpected rewards and the special times from five decades of working for "the man" and for myself. I will recall the moments that mattered.
Perhaps the biggest came in 1994, when I walked into a newsroom to a standing ovation. My peers, fellow editors and reporters at a daily newspaper in Washington, had just learned of my award in a regional journalism competition and let me know it. They took a moment from their busy schedules to acknowledge a job well done.
I will also remember the thank-yous, which always seemed to come at the right times. In 1983, a New York woman, the mother of an introverted boy, thanked me for teaching her son to ride a bike at camp. Eight years later, a girls basketball team sent me a card after I covered their heartbreaking run through a state tournament. In 2006, a Montana man thanked me for helping him reunite with a German woman he had met in the Army fifty years earlier. I was a reference librarian then, a person who loved to solve problems.
Now, I am a retiree, a soon-to-be Social Security recipient who can shop for senior discounts, take afternoon naps, and tell teenagers to get off my lawn. (Just kidding. I don't have a lawn.)
I don't plan to remain idle. I value time like most people value food and plan to put that time to good use. Sometime in January, after returning from a vacation in Puerto Rico, I will lay the groundwork for my next book, my next series, and my next course in life.
That's what I look forward to most. Retirement, for me, will not be an opportunity to rest. It will be a chance to do more. Much more.
